So all this old school RPG talk had me digging through my - literally - thousands of old games to find a few old school gems.
I spent the last 2 days installing and then sampling the following:
Fallout 1
Fallout 2
BG1
Wasteland
Oh my… between resolution (lack thereof), crude visuals, simple controls and color palette I unfortunately found these practically unplayable which makes me sad since I remember these games so fondly.
I also have Darklands, Darksun, Nox, Darkstone, BG2, Neuromancer, Buck Rogers Countdown to Doomsday, Champions of Krynn, Pools of Darkness and Bards Tale that I dare not even install for fear of tainting the memores
That’s about as dumb as saying a book’s unreadable because the paperback is old, yellowed and beat up, assuming all the letters are there and legible.
Those games are classics- they may not be up to date in terms of graphics, and in some cases, weren’t even cutting edge when they were published, but they’re still the same games, and they’re still fun.
The only one I could even remotely see someone having a hard time with is Wasteland, and that’s because it’s nearly a quarter-century old. Fallout 2 was in 2000 I believe, and I think Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 1 are only a year or two before that, which makes them reasonably modern, even if not rendered as 3d graphics.
As a guy who’s prone to ambling down memory lane, I gotta say - I can take old and outdated graphics fine, but I’m having a harder and harder time re-building a tolerance to outdated UIs and bad control schemes. Great games as they may be, Fallout’s inventory system is genuinely horrible (as is that of Thief), the “tank controls” of Resident Evil characters are quite possibly the work of the Devil himself, Baldur’s Gate’s quest journal is a fucking nightmare, X-Com’s lack of permanent inventories is akin to getting getting punched in the nuts over and over with reckless abandon (thankfully that one can be hacked around these days), the complete lack of survival instinct among Command & Conquer troops is a quick path to a rageuninstall (WHY DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU FUCKMOOKS TO SHOOT BACK ?!) … that kind of thing.
That being said, on the graphics front I have to agree with **bump **- sure, *Fallout *looks like ass today. But then again it looked like ass back in the day, too. Isometric 2D was already well on its way out by 1997, and even there it absolutely paled compared to contemporary examples like *Diablo *or Jagged Alliance 2. It’s still an awesome game.
Except the inventory, which can go suck a bag of dicks.
